Mammy Graul

Fatman Feedbag's page

91 posts. No reviews. No lists. No wishlists.


RSS

1 to 50 of 91 << first < prev | 1 | 2 | next > last >>

Hi There,

Regrettably, I need to cancel all of my subscriptions.

Thanks,

Fatman


Ixancoatl wrote:

I have always been a firm believer in the randomness of character generation throughout all of the editions of D&D I have played. It was once a badge of honor to be willing to risk really crappy rolls for the chance of really outstanding rolls. You'd roll your stats and, since you had an outrageously strong grasp of the system, fit your rolls into a character you were comfortable playing. When did that give way to point buys that merely give you the illusion of control?

I'm just curious how everyone else feels about this topic. Generally, we use the 4d6, drop the lowest, version. It seems to work well enough. How does everyone else handle it?

Point buy really lends itself to the min/maxer. I even min/max in those systems. In fact, point buy screams at you to min/max. I really, really prefer the roll and decide methods - but my group uses point buy. So guess what? With magic items, at 6th level our fighter has a 26 strength and our wizard has a 23 Int.


rom90125 wrote:
SirUrza wrote:
I like the GameMastery Combat Pad. I'm shocked to see Paizo doesn't have anymore, I'd check your local gaming stores for it.

Thanks for the reply SirUrza.

I have a Combat Pad however I'm looking for an equivalent to the 4e tool, DnD4e Combat Tracker that uses the PRD as the underlying data source. I am attempting to consolidate all of my DMing resources onto my laptop.

This one by Veector has the basic functionality but no bells and whistles:

link


Snorter wrote:

I think older gamers have a blind spot about the unbalanced nature of the traditional core classes, because older games didn't level the PCs up as fast.

While there may have been a subconscious niggling in the back of their minds, that high-level spells had some crazy effects, they never got to see them in play.

Hence the blank stares, and the cries of "What do you mean, the Wizard/Cleric/Druid need nerfing? I never had a problem with them in my games, in 20 years!".

Well, no, you probably didn't. Not when your PCs retired, middle-aged, at level 7.

Ha ha.. yeah that's totally true. The vast (and I mean VAST) majority of my 1E/2E experience was under 12th level. The funny thing is that those levels were (and still are) the so-called "sweet spot" of the game. With the advent of 3.X, now we shoot right through the sweet spot so fast and spend a lot more time in the wacky high levels so the game feels more unbalanced.

Remember also that in 1E/2E characters got a lot of their power and uniqueness from their magic items and not so much from their classes (except for spell casters). Now, there are some standard magic items that every "build" should have and they are much less exciting. The excitement comes from your build.


Yerv Kinkash wrote:
My question is: When did the player gain as much power over the game as they seem to have today?

For the record, I started in 1983 with the "Red Box".

I think this happened when the focus of the game turned to the mechanics of the rules instead of the story. In my experience, this was happening in the later 2E days for sure but sky rocketed with the release of 3E. In particular, the inclusion of skills and feats, which brought builds and mechanics for everything that we used to just role-play, and the focus on miniatures combat and the host of rules that came along with that, did a number on the interactive story telling that we all used to do way back in 1E.

For me, while I think as a mechanical system 3.X is more honed, the actual gameplay of 1E was far, far better. Why? Less rules means more interactive storytelling and interactive storytelling is what tabletop games are best at.


These are all good points. I'm playing a druid this time around and I'll give it a go to see how it works out.


Dragonchess Player wrote:
There's been some discussion on whether or not a mystic theurge is "viable" during play...

In a word: no. I played one... just don't do it. It just wasn't an effective class in any way. After endless pressure by the rest of my group I finally just ditched it and rolled a new character. I really think they missed the boat on this one.

To make it effective, rather than dual classing the two casters like that, just use the spell point totals as they would normally be for a single class (like the cleric), but divide the spells memorized for each level between the two classes. That way they still have level effective spells. IMHO that's how multiclassing should work in this game anyway.

The real weakness is that, in many ways, the game is designed for the lower level spells to fall out of effectiveness as the levels rise (due to saves etc... like flaming sphere), leaving only the higher level spells to be effective. The Mystic Theurge loses these effective spells all together.


You know... after like 3rd level I really can't see my druid ever casting these spells. What good is a 4 hit die mob in a fight between 7th+ level PCs and 7-10th level bad guys?


Set wrote:
Rock Hardwood!

hmmm... I think I saw that movie back in college... :-}


Anyone got a good name for a human male druid?


Kolokotroni wrote:
Figures, everything dnd has it's origins in either tolkien or vance.

I though everything had its origin in Google?


golem101 wrote:
I was somewhat interested in it (after Dundjinni and Campaign Cartographer 3 it was just curiosity, rather than actual need), but the required .NET + XNA framework messed up my rig big time, and I had to step away even from the trial version.

It works totally smooth on mine. Funny that XNA & .NET would muck with your machine seeing as they are both from Microsoft in the first place! :-)


ElyasRavenwood wrote:

At the moment I am having fun making a pathfinder elven druid. As I was going through the special racial abilities, I noticed that elves are immune to magical sleep. Come to think of it I think they were immune to sleep back before first edition, when elves were a character class in the basic D&D game. I was wondering, why are elves immune to magical sleep? I remember all of the flavor about the elven reverie, which meant that they don’t sleep, but meditate to help keep their long memories and minds cohesive.

So in short why are elves immune to magical sleep, and in terms of the games history where does this immunity come from?
Thanks.

Wasn't this just simply to balance them out against some other melee unit way back in the pre-D&D days when Gary and Dave were still just moving minis around a castle? I remember something along those lines...


This has to be the cheapest map tool out there that doesn't suck:

http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=8065


stringburka wrote:
Actually, if I was to rebuild all the classes, I'd get rid of a few. Multiclassing is so easy nowadays, I'd rather focus on broad classes that have an even easier time multiclassing than they have now, turning certain class features into feat chains instead.

Yes! +1


You guys are nutz.

Without a cleric in this game your party is toast - unless your DM scales back on the monster melee units. But if he/she doesn't, and you are playing any of the published adventures/paths, your party is t-o-a-s-t.


Davor wrote:
As long as they aren't diminishing the group's capabilities ...

With such a low AC and a rage that forces them to fight till they die (if you roleplay at all) they require their own personal cleric to heal them every round or they will die (actual death) so fast you miss it if you blink. In our Rise of the Runelords game, at 9th level our melee PCs were fending off 2-5 attacks a round, every round, each of which was averaging ~20-25 damage. The barbarian gets hit by 95% of those attacks (literally!).

That's one major suck on the group's capabilities.

A 9th level cleric who is totally dedicated to just keeping the barbarian alive can't actually keep up with the damage they take. And at 9th level, we're not just talking about the barbarian getting dropped every combat - we're talking about the barbarian possibly dying every combat!


Kevin Mack wrote:
Uh just checked the rage entry dosent say anything about not being able to rage in heavy armour.

oh right, my bad. I'll update the AC graph to assume they are in full plate.


For all the "heavy armor" arguments: remember that the barbarian cannot rage while in heavy armor.

For the various "what was /was not counted" arguments, that's why I posted all the stats I used in the graphs - so you could answer these questions yourself.

For whoever made those "you don't play..." comments: lol

For whoever asked "don't you think the dev's would have..." comments: I hope but wouldn't assume that at all - I've seen worse in this field.


BobChuck wrote:

ugh....

To summarize: we found that all of the classes besides Fighter come out more or less equal to each other; in other words, the Barbarian isn't weak, he's balanced.

A Fighter is better at fighting than a Barbarian. A Fighter is better at fighting than a Ranger, a Monk, a Rogue, a Melee Druid, a Summoner's Eldiolon, an a Melee Bard.

A Fighter is better at fighting than every other class in the entire game because all Fighters do is fight. They have no tricks like rage powers ...

umm.. all a barbarian does is fight. their rage powers are pretty weak with a couple of exceptions and they flat-out die and fast after level con/2 - esp. with their AC being so dramatically lower than fighters at mid-high levels that monster melee units automatically hit them unless they roll a 1.

this class is not-at-all balanced.


My group was talking about the mechanics of the barbarian and the fighter the other day. The talking points were basically that the fighter should be able to outlast the barbarian, but the barbarian was the higher damage-dealer. Since I’m always focused on game balance (meaning that given two melee classes like this, if both are to be appealing to play, then one’s strengths & weaknesses should be complimented by those of the other), I took a look at the stats to see if that was really the case.

Here are the results:

Attack
Damage
AC
HP
Fighter Data
Barbarian Data

How I made these graphs:
For attack bonus I am including:

  • weapon focus
  • greater weapon focus
  • weapon specialization
  • greater weapon specialization
  • weapon training
  • barbarian rage

For the AC I am including:

  • 10 + breastplate for the barbarian (highest armor possible while raging)
  • 10 + full plate for the fighter
  • armor training
  • heavy shield
  • shield focus
  • greater shield focus
  • barbarian rage
  • max dexterity modifier

Notes:
- In all cases, the barbarian is considered to be raging.
- To tease out the core differences between the two classes, I didn’t include any bonuses that would be applied equally to both classes such as magical bonuses for armor and weapons and items, or strength modifiers.
- Dexterity does have a significant difference in the AC between the two classes, so I included the maximum dex that would be allowed to the class.
- I would have liked to include a rage power in there somewhere, but there just aren’t any that I could include in this kind of comparison.

So, what do we find out?

  • The barbarian has a +2/+2 melee advantage over the fighter until level 5.
  • After ~10 level the fighter has a better attack and damage bonus.
  • The fighter always has a major advantage in AC over the barbarian.
  • The barbarian always has a slight advantage in HP over the fighter.
  • After 5th level, the fighter is superior to the barbarian in all ways.
  • When survivability is considered, the damage output of the fighter is dramatically higher.
  • The idea that the barbarian is a DPS class is false.

So, after all that, here’s my question: why include two similar melee-only classes where one is so markedly superior (mechanically) to the other?


seekerofshadowlight wrote:
NE would, NG would not true N I also do not see doing it. A N person might if they thought they had no other option and would feel bad about it but it needed done and all, after all not there kid. They had options and played it up, zero guilt there. There was no gain, then Acting like they were helping find he child they sold put it over the line.

Yeah, I'm talking about LN, N & CN.


j l 629 wrote:

...

He oversaw the selling of a lost orphan baby he found to an evil witch wearing cloths made of human skin in exchange for her aid in helping a city under attack. "I don't know that baby" was their reply. Of course they had to come across a blind lost mother of the baby frantically searching later, which they fail to tell anything about the baby to and pretend to help her look.

He shot a member of the army of the nation he is pretending to work with in the back pretty much because he really liked his awesome pistol. This man had done some bad wartime things and had captured an agent of the PC's nation so this is a fuzzy line, but not a good action.

...

These are things a neutral character would do just as easily as an evil character. Like I said, neutral isn't good.


I would move him closer to Neutral on his good/evil axis. Remember that neutral people are not good people. They are not the kind of people you would want to hang out with. They can be selfish, mean, heartless, backstabbing, and ruthless - but that by itself doesn't make one evil. The evil part comes in when they enjoy inflicting pain like this on other people or because the sheer scale of what they are doing is beyond redemption.

The PC here, unless I didn't catch it, didn't do this because he wanted to see the prisoner writhe in anguish, or because of some sick pleasure in watching someone else suffer. He was almost duty-bound or had run out of other options. That is a perfectly neutral thing to do - but it doesn't make him evil.

On that note - I've noticed a tendency for people to think of the neutral alignments as almost a "buffered good" rather than a neutral. Neutral is a dark alignment - it's not evil, but is certainly isn't good either.


This happened to my group about 10 years ago. Do yourself a big gigantic favor and leave the group. Go out into the world and form another one from scratch. In our group, the end result was a lot of really bad feelings, a couple of lost friends, and a couple of them ended up leaving gaming behind forever. I ended up not gaming regularly for a couple of years myself and then it took a bit of work to get back into it.

Sometimes this just happens.


I'm thinking about getting it but wanted to ask what you guys think first. It looks pretty good for the price but I'm kinda on the fence.
Here's the link.


True - if you've got a Mac you can always VM Windows on it.


DTiles is totally awesome for making your own dungeon maps. It's super fast and you don't need a PhD to figure it out.


BQ wrote:
Hey does anyone know of a good (and ideally free) map making software to download. Looking primarily at buildings and dungeons, but if it can do terrain then that would be awesome

DTiles is awesome for making your own dungeons.


Vic Wertz wrote:
Fatman Feedbag wrote:
If I had a product line that I was selling through on RPG Now & RPG Drive Through etc.. how would I go about selling it through Paizo as well?
Contact jeff.alvarez@paizo.com.

Great! Thanks Vic!


If I had a product line that I was selling through on RPG Now & RPG Drive Through etc.. how would I go about selling it through Paizo as well?


I'd like to see a Pathfinder only version of Dungeon & Dragon Magazines back - under Paizo's divine guidance!


100000000% agreed.


With the way DCs work, the Summoner being basically 2 spell levels behind pretty much makes this class non-competitive in combat, spell wise. It's not really what I expected from a Summoner class - maybe that's not a bad thing - but it doesn't really fit thematically or mechanically with what I would want from a Summoner class either. It's more like an "I've got a weird monstrous pet" class.

I would have voted for dropping the ability to cast any of the standard spells and replacing them entirely with a host of Summoner-only summoning spells that are more level appropriate than the woefully underpowered monster summoning spells. Check out the summoning spells posted on the pathfinder database as an example.


Frogboy wrote:
...and an overwhelming majority cried out that they don't ever, in a million years, want to see a Pathfinder v2. They don't even want to entertain the idea. You probably just want this thread to quietly fall into the archives. I've still got burn marks on me.

Heh, I wasn't really looking for a discussion on what specific rules would be changed etc. but more along the lines of how might they go about introducing a new version of a game in general to a community without causing the kind of upset that *you know who* did twice with D&D.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

How Should Paizo Do It Differently?

I was just reading through this excellent thread here and after a while I started to think about what is going to happen when Paizo comes to the inevitable point where they have to produce a Pathfinder 2nd Edition. It would have to incorporate system changes but, as we have seen, if these system changes are too dramatic they tend to split the community.

What advice would you give to Paizo about how to evolve the product line without fracturing/isolating the community?


veector wrote:
Thanks to everyone for help and suggestions. At the mention from another player in the group, I looked up how d20 Modern handles vehicle collisions. It's slightly more cumbersome, but I think this system works very well...

Interesting. While there's some strangeness to it I think the smaller object should take the number of dice caused by the larger object and the larger object should take the number of dice caused by the smaller. Like a Yugo getting hit by an 18-wheeler - the Yugo gets totally smashed and the 18-wheeler gets a dent... momentum.


YeuxAndI wrote:
YeuxAndI wrote:

My dad's book was messed up, so he emailed Customer Service and we got THIS.

Thanks so so so so much. We really cannot deal with how cool this is. Consider us and the Polyhedron Patheon of Paizo forever allies and boon companions.

The happiest gnomes you've ever known,
The Free State of 618

I'm silly, posted that and went to bed.

Fixed!

HOLY COOLNESS!

... ummm.... yeah.... my book was messed up too..... yeah that's it!


Lord Fyre wrote:
I am not sure if that was actually a problem or not. (Slowing down level advancement sounds almost like a "solution" to several problems.)

oh don't get me wrong. I totally agree. The whole 3.x experience model is one of those things I can't get past. But we really shouldn't hijack this thread... :-)


Lord Fyre wrote:

I hear you, and yes I felt the same way. Alas, I am way out here in California.

Perhaps I am romanticising, but did 2nd Edition have as many balance problems as 3.x?

oh yes - but they were different. Some of them you didn't hit very often because it was really hard to get that high up in level (one of the problems :-).

What you didn't have was how players could sculpt a total overpowered character with feats (there was a bit of this with the "brown-book" kits, if you remember) and prestige classes. And then you also didn't have characters getting frustrated by their prestige class looking cool on paper but turning out to be lame in practice, among others.


Well, as one of the guys that was largely disenfranchised by the 2E/3E split (I never really have gotten past my dislike of certain fundamental structures in 3.x and I don't even recognize 4E), I can say that over the years it has become nearly impossible to find a 2E group or even 2E events at conventions. They are out there but honestly I can't find one and I'm in Boston.

Now, back then there was nothing like Pathfinder to fill in the void of the missing edition. So there is a good chance for the 3.x system to survive over time. But when this happened before, it was a really sad "end of an era" period - like forever losing your youth and knowing you'd never be able to do that thing you really, really loved to do again.


TLO3 wrote:
I think you'll end up with problems because HP is an abstraction that also encompasses general sturdiness and toughness of form. A muscular raging orc barbarian will be more likely to survive the shock and damage of a long fall than a frail wizard. Muscles and skin help protect bone from breaks and fractures.

yeah, I know. It's a hairy mess. :-)

...the rule - not the muscular raging orc barbarian...


Also on a side note (hopefully not a hijacker!), although I know this is not the way it works in Pathfinder for simplicities/heroics sake, but when we start to talk about falling damage, damage should probably be applied in terms of % of total hit points rather than in static points. The reason being that hit points themselves are a bit of an abstraction that encompasses not only actual physical damage, but also the combatants ability to "roll with the punches" etc, etc. - things that one can't do on the impact from a fall.


veector wrote:

You know you love the bullywug! Can I say that? You know you love the boggard!

Just so you guys know, Fatman is a player in my game. Some of the discussion occurred last night as well. Why he picks that avatar? Um... maybe he's just trying to confuse you all!

Bullywug love... I think I saw some of that in the movie Sideways...


dulsin wrote:
The fact that the creature took a double move should have no bearing on the damage.

Double move, Agreed. If however it was moving faster than that (running/sprinting) - which means faster than normal movement - then it would increase.


Ughbash wrote:

Well a ring of featehr falling slows you to 60' per round. So as a SIMPLE fix I would remove 60 from your calculation.

Now if you want to get COMPLEX, the dragonm was moving 300' over 6 seconds which is 50' per second.

On earth if youfall from a height of 64' you will impact in 2 seconds at a speed of 64' per second and take in D*D terms 6d6 (or is it 5d6 for a fall from 64').

So if you wanted to scale it there, say for every 10' per second over 10 you take 1d6. This means that the dragon, going 50' per second would take 4d6.

I disagree. At 50'/second that's ~34 mph. Have you ever seen what happens to a car or a tractor-trailer that hits an immovable wall at 34 mph? It gets totaled. There is way more than 5d6 damage done to those vehicles at that kind of speed. The same applies to the dragon.

BTW, 5d6 averages to 17 points of damage which is about what our 9th level fighter averages on a single hit. It seems that a dragon flying at double speed into an immovable wall would take more damage than that.


Hey Veector... why do you look so familiar?


Hydro wrote:

As I've suggested, multiple die of bonus damage as a swift action doesn't strike me as underpowered, nor as something that needs a boost.

But to those of you playing crazy non-good negative-channeling priests, tell us how it works out!

No, I don;t think it needs a boost... I'm just wondering why something so situational or non-advantageous it's included at all.


Frogboy wrote:

For the most part, the OP is right. Channeling Smite is a probably not worth a feat, at least not for a PC. If you want to maximize (specialize) your damage potential against undead BBEGs and possibly evil outsider BBEGs with another feat, this would be the way to go. Battle Priests who channel negative energy and don't focus much on CHA could use it too but chances are, you won't do much extra damage with it unless your target rolls bad on his save.

It would be a much better feat if you didn't lose it on a miss or only needed to meet their touch AC in order to deliver the channel damage if the attack didn't pierce through their armor or perhaps didn't allow for a save. It's close to being useful but not quite there. I have a feeling that a lot of people will eventually house rule this to one (or some) of the options that I listed. I kind of like the touch AC one myself. It would be cool to use it as a touch attack if need be.

Agreed! :=)


Dissinger wrote:
True enough, but even then its a question of Standard action to hurt one guy, or weaken the audience...

Or even more to the point: its a question of swift action to hurt one guy with a good chance of missing and losing the channel, or standard action to hurt the audience guaranteed - no chance to not do any damage.

I still only see this as advantageous to something that channels negative energy as a way to avoid hurting his companions when selective channeling won't let him exclude all of them.

All in all, I doubt I'd ever have a PC that takes this feat.

1 to 50 of 91 << first < prev | 1 | 2 | next > last >>